


Just the One

by alanna_the_lionheart



Series: SOTY (2015/16) [3]
Category: Arrow (TV 2012)
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Dreams, F/M, Falling In Love, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Love, Memories, Missing Scene, One Shot, Recovered Memories, Romance, SOTY, SOTY 2015, Short, Short & Sweet, The Crucible - Freeform, happy stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-17
Updated: 2015-07-17
Packaged: 2018-04-09 18:29:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4359695
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alanna_the_lionheart/pseuds/alanna_the_lionheart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Do you have any happy stories?” If Oliver had really wanted to answer Felicity’s question, he would have said “no.” He hasn’t had any happy stories in a long time, not since the Island. But then an old memory resurfaces in a dream, causing Oliver to rethink not just his answer to her question, but the way he sees her. Missing moment from 2x04 "The Crucible."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just the One

**Author's Note:**

> Written on 7/4 for the Tumblr Arrow Summer Rewatch challenge to write a missing moment from 2x04 “The Crucible.” Takes place the night following Oliver’s conversation with Diggle and Felicity about his past on the Island with Sara.

**Just the One**

 

_“Do you have any happy stories?”_

Felicity hadn’t thought that Oliver had heard the question…but he had; he’d heard her loud and clear. And try as he might, he can’t get the question out of his mind.

 

_“Do you have any happy stories?”_

If he’d had the time – or the desire – to answer her, he would have said “no.” He hasn’t had any happy stories for a long time. Not since the Island.

 

Oliver goes to bed that night with her voice echoing in his head.

 

_“Do you have any happy stories?”_

He closes his eyes, tries to calm his mind, and eventually, he sleeps.

 

* * *

 

_The dream comes to him out of nowhere. Usually he dreams of death and storms and broken relationships. But tonight he dreams of warmth and sunshine._

_He dreams he’s back at Queen Consolidated, breaking into his father’s computer in search of information. He’s just started downloading the files he needs onto a flash drive when he’s interrupted by the sound of heels clacking down the hallway toward him. He hides around the corner just as the girl comes into view. She has a blonde ponytail and glasses, and she’s wearing a black skirt with a white polka dot blouse._

_She stops at the desk and looks at the photo framed there: an old shot of him and his father._

_“You’re cute,” he hears her say out loud. She leans over the table and keeps talking. “It’s too bad you’re, ya know, dead. Which is obviously a lot worse for you than it is for me.”_

_Something about the way she babbles seems so familiar to him._

_And then she stands up, and in the dim lighting of the office he can finally make out her face._

_He remembers this night. It’s the night four years ago when he returned to Starling City with Maseo._

_She continues talking even as she walks away. “I really need to learn to stop talking to myself.”_

_Oliver smiles, and his heart skips a beat. As she walks away from him, her image begins to fade, and Oliver suddenly realizes that he doesn’t want her to go. He wills her to stay, but the dream begins to slip through his fingers._

He wakes with a gasp, sitting straight up in bed, and her name leaves his lips before he can stop it.

 

“Felicity.”

 

The memory comes back to him, slowly at first, then faster and faster until all the pieces have fallen together. It’s a memory full of light and smiles; one that doesn’t fit in amongst the rest of his memories of his time away from home. Maybe that’s why he’d forgotten it. Maybe it had gotten buried under five years of pain and torture, loss and darkness.

 

Oliver closes his eyes, letting the memory replay in his mind, over and over. And the longer Oliver watches the more sure he becomes. _She_ was the one. Felicity was the girl he had seen all those years ago. The one who had made him smile when he never thought he could be happy again. The one who had brightened his world by simply walking into it.

 

Oliver sits alone in his bed and he smiles to himself in the dark.

 

_“Do you have any happy stories?”_

“Just the one,” he whispers into the night.

 

* * *

 

 _“Do you have any happy stories?”_  
  


He looks at her differently after that; begins to see her in a new light.

 

Her constant babbling, which he’s always found to be endearing, suddenly makes his heart seize in his chest. When she smiles at him, he smiles back, and he finds himself wondering how he can get her to do it again. When she makes unhelpful innuendos, Oliver’s brain takes him to inappropriate places.

 

He wants to protect her, to keep her safe, but more than that he wants her to be happy. He wants to see her smile, hear her laugh, and make her feel appreciated.

 

He begins to realize that she’s not just tech savvy; she’s a genius. She’s kind, and funny, and willing to do whatever it takes to help people. She’s more of a hero than he could ever hope to be.

 

He falls in love with her slowly. He’s not even aware that it’s happening until the day he says those three words to her for the first time.

 

“I love you.”

 

He says them as a ruse, but he knows deep down that they’re true, and he wonders how he didn’t see it sooner. Perhaps it was his own stubbornness, his own ignorance. But on the day he begs, “Don’t ask me to say that I don’t love you,” he realizes that he didn’t see it sooner because he was defending himself from the inevitable pain.

 

Because he knows, deep down, that he can’t be with her. He knew it that night he remembered seeing her for the first time. He knew it that day, two weeks later, when he’d quietly said, “because of the life that I lead, I just think it’s better to not be with someone that I could really care about.”

 

Saying those words to her had broken his heart in two; telling her that he can’t be the Arrow and be with her shatters it completely. He’s left with a constant ache in his chest, a weight that drags him down as he forces himself to keep going…a pain that threatens to destroy him every day he wakes up and knows that he can’t be with her. It’s a pain he lives with for a long time….

 

Until the day he finally says, “I want to be with you,” and his whole world changes.

 

* * *

 

_“Do you have any happy stories?”_

 

He doesn’t tell her about that day he saw her from afar; not right away. He waits for the right moment, feeling that he’ll know it when it comes.

 

And he does.

 

Nearly three years after their first date, Oliver takes her back to the same Italian restaurant. It’s been newly remodeled after the explosion, thanks in no small part to a large donation from the two of them, and they’re sitting at their own private table at the back.

 

It’s there that he finally tells her.

 

And it’s there that he gets down on one knee, holds out a ring cut with green emeralds and red rubies, and asks her to marry him.

 

Because she was the one ray of sunshine in a dark and haunted past. She was his one happy story in a sea of dark tales. Because thanks to her, he knows he can have a happy ending.

 

And on the day they vow to have and to hold, Oliver looks forward to fifty-four more years of life in the sun.

 

* * *

 

“Do you have any happy stories?” she asks him on their first night together as husband and wife.

 

He smiles warmly at her, his heart so full of happiness he’s afraid it might burst. He kisses her gently, and when he pulls away he rests his forehead against hers and whispers against her lips:

 

“Just the one. _You._ ”

 

**_…the end…_ **


End file.
